Steven Miles has sand in his shoes. “Sand everywhere,” he says as he fidgets and shifts his stance in front of television cameras in Mackay.
The Queensland election campaign has reached the point where there’s no time to stall for trivial things, like part of a kindergarten sandpit stowed away between the premier’s toes on the 900km flight back to Brisbane. The sand is still there when he walks on stage to speak at the local government conference that afternoon.
Those who know Miles well say he can at times appear brow-beaten; exhausted by the daily grind of politics. He has admitted sometimes being “drained” by the constant spotlight and envious of colleagues who draw energy from it.
On the campaign trail, Miles has come alive.
An irony of being a long way behind in the polls is that the situation has given Miles the freedom to take risks: to campaign as though he has nothing to lose. To run at breakneck speed, as if exhaustion is tomorrow’s problem. To not worry about whether a stumble or a gaffe might shift the margins, as it might in a tight race.
He mucks around with kids for longer than scheduled at a kindergarten at Beaconsfield, a suburb north of Mackay. His minders hold their breath as the premier takes off his shoes and socks and wades ankle-deep into the sort of situation that a frontrunner would avoid – a sandpit inhabited by a dozen preschool kids.
The children begin to build a mound around his foot, and pile more clumps up the leg of his blue trousers. “Are you putting sand down my pants?” he asks one boy, who is armed with a blue shovel.
Miles’s advisers take another deep breath at the title of the book the children choose for him to read – Here Comes Stinkbug! – worried about the potential for Miles to be compared to the main character.
The moral of the story is about the pitfalls of not being yourself. It might as well be a parable for Miles’s evolution as a political leader.
The Labor ‘insurgency’
Labor has been in power for almost a decade in Queensland and the polls suggest these are the dying days of a government that has won three straight elections, and 11 of the past 12.
The polls also show the race tightening slightly as it heads into the final week. Some strategists have suggested the premier might be better served spending his time sandbagging seats in Brisbane, where voters appear to be trickling back, than playing charter jet leapfrog around central and north Queensland, where sentiment for change is seemingly baked in.
Instead, the Miles campaign feels more like an insurgency. He began Monday in Cairns and finished in Townsville. On Tuesday he flew to Mackay, then back to Brisbane to speak to the state’s mayors, before that evening’s televised debate.
At Labor’s campaign launch, a week earlier, party elders lamented that the premier had not had more time to turn around poor polling that eventually prompted the retirement of Annastacia Palaszczuk, who won three elections.
“Prior to the change of leadership 10 months ago the Labor government was in for a hiding,” the former premier, Peter Beattie, told party faithful.
“Steven is putting up a real fight.”
Some in Labor have suggested that Miles’s campaign performance is evidence that Palaszczuk clung on too long and didn’t give her successor a fighting chance. Others dismiss the idea: they say Miles barely shifted the dial in nine months but the campaign trail has been the catalyst for bringing out a more effective style.
“I think what the last few weeks has shown us is that [opposition leader] David Crisafulli doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and maybe some will question whether we could have done more on that front – if we left [attacks] too late,” one Labor MP said.
As deputy premier, Miles carved out a niche as Labor’s wisecracking attack dog. When he became the premier, he appeared like a man fighting his own instincts – lacking emotion and animation and unsure about how to act like the leader of a state.
Colleagues expressed private concerns, too, that Miles wasn’t an effective communicator, or that he wouldn’t be able to successfully straddle the city-regional divide, a hallmark of successful Queensland political leaders.
In north Queensland, the self-described “introvert” seemed altogether less awkward. This is a place that seems drawn to authentic characters – the Cairns MP, Michael Healy, for instance, who rocks up to a press conference in patterned board shorts, after a morning swim – and Miles has leaned in to what feels natural.
“The bloke’s a dill,” Miles said of Crisafulli in Cairns. “He reckons you can say anything and get away with saying anything.”
The final days
Labor MPs say Miles has clearly sought to make the most of his short tenure as Queensland’s premier.
“I definitely think that … what you’ve seen is a premier who has taken the view that ‘I might only have 10 months, and so I have to make it count’,” one Labor MP says.
“We’ve done things that in the past would have been deemed too big a risk, the 50c fares and other things. Now it’s like, ‘Why didn’t we think of this before?’”
Everyone in Miles’s orbit seemed to feel a momentum running through the campaign as it entered its final days. Miles has ramped up attacks on Crisafulli (whose name he pronounces like Cris-a-fool-y) for refusing to answer questions, particularly about abortion rights.
“You can’t, in an election campaign, ask about every issue that will come up over the next four years,” Miles says.
“That’s just not how elections work. But what you need to do is get to know the leaders, so you know their values framework, so you know what they bring to the job, [and] so you know what they’ll consider when issues come up. And David Crisafulli refuses to answer all of those questions.”
The sense is Labor is making up ground but running out of time. On Thursday Miles set off to visit 36 seats in the final 36 hours. By then, more than 1.2 million people – one in three eligible voters – had already voted.
“I think it’s a real shame [for people who have voted early],” Miles says.
“They’ve had to vote without all the facts. They’ve had to vote without knowing what Crisafulli would do to a woman’s right to choose, without knowing what he would cut to fund his promises.
“And there’s only a few more days now before 100% of Queenslanders will have voted without knowing those answers.”
There have been some public suggestions that Miles might have earned the right to remain Labor leader, should he wish, if his party loses the election. Asked about the possibly, Miles said he was “not losing a single ounce of energy on that”.
“My energy belongs to the campaign. All of my energy, as you can see, is going to winning as many seats and retaining government for Labor.”
